Jonathan Skinner | University Of Roehampton (original) (raw)

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Papers by Jonathan Skinner

land, Germany, and the European Union countries in general); and New Zealand and Australia. One o... more land, Germany, and the European Union countries in general); and New Zealand and Australia. One of their strengths is that, unlike some others working in Mount Hagen among the Hagen people, they learned the language, Melpa, and used it to understand the lives of the local people. Their most recent co-authored books include

Face-to-face interviews are a fundamental research tool in qualitative research. Whilst this form... more Face-to-face interviews are a fundamental research tool in qualitative research. Whilst this form of data collection can provide many valuable insights, it can often fall short of providing a complete picture of a research subject's experiences. Point of view (PoV) interviewing is an elicitation technique used in the social sciences as a means of enriching data obtained from research interviews. Recording research subjects' first person perspectives , for example by wearing digital video glasses, can afford deeper insights into their experiences. PoV interviewing can promote making visible the unverbalizable and does not rely as much on memory as the traditional interview. The use of such relatively inexpensive technology is gaining interest in health profession educational research and pedagogy, such as dynamic simulation-based learning and research activities. In this interview, Dr Gerry Gormley (a medical education researcher) talks to Dr Jonathan Skin-ner (an anthropologist with an interest in PoV interviewing), exploring some of the many crossover implications with PoV interviewing for medical education research and practice.

This article uses the personalised political tour of the Falls Road as a case study with which to... more This article uses the personalised political tour of the Falls Road as a case study with which to unpack the debate on political tourism in Northern Ireland. It shows how significant the walking mode of tourist transport is to the tourist experience and how integrated and effective it is in the context of explaining the Troubles and extending the Republican ideology. Within this contentious narrative of movement, the tour guide develops an ambivalence that intrigues, repulses and propels the tourist through the tour.

This article is about an anthropologist coming to terms with the field and fieldwork. In 1995, I ... more This article is about an anthropologist coming to terms with the field and fieldwork. In 1995, I left – was evacuated from – my fieldsite as a volcanic eruption started just as my period of fieldwork drew to a close. These eruptions dramatically and instantaneously altered life on the island of Montserrat, a British colony in the Caribbean. While Montserrat the land, and Montserratians the people, migrated and moved on with their lives, Montserrat and Montserratians were preserved in my mind and in my anthropological writings as from “back home.” Revisiting Montserrat several years into the volcano crisis, I
drove through the villages and roads leading to the former capital of the island, where I had worked from. My route to this modern-day Pompeii threw up a stark contrast between absence and presence, the imagined past and the experienced present. This is understood, in part, by examining the literary work of two other travelers through Montserrat, Henry Coleridge and Pete McCarthy, both of whom have a very different experience of the place and the people.

This article is an examination of the uneasy relationship between religion and witchcraft (the wo... more This article is an examination of the uneasy relationship between religion and witchcraft (the worship of the serpent/obeah) on the British colony of Montserrat in the Eastern Caribbean. It looks at obeah in the 20th century as practised by colonial British subjects and prohibited by British law imposed by British expatriates. Colonial governance is examined first through correspondence at the start of the 20th century, and then through newspaper archives and fieldwork reports and experiences throughout the century. The continued use of anti-obeah laws by the British is shown to be an irrational but effective colonial technology of control.

This is an impressionistic tale from the field. It is a composite of fieldwork days, the dramati... more This is an impressionistic tale from the field. It is a composite of fieldwork days, the dramatic recall of ethnographic work on Montserrat, a British Dependent Territory in the Eastern Caribbean. At the tail-end of my fieldwork research period, I was evacuated from the island as a volcano erupted, eventually destroying almost all of where this piece is set - where the ethnography was practised. Though this is not ‘salvage ethnography’, there is thus an element of reconstruction to this piece, of ‘paradise regained’. On Montserrat, ‘neaga’ is a term with derogatory connotations, but it is also an inclusive term referring to ‘folk’. This experimental insight into ‘doing’ ethnography, autoethnography in this case, is dedicated to Pippa and those who have been killed and displaced by the volcano.

In the same year that we were told that ethnography was in an 'experimental moment' one that shou... more In the same year that we were told that ethnography was in an 'experimental moment' one that should remain endlessly experimental, Paul Stoller (1986) was introducing us to an anthropology of the senses. Stoller used cuisine as an entrée to the senses, arguing that anthropologists should give readers or viewers 'a sense of what it is like to live in other worlds, a taste of ethnographic things ' (1986: 156). Stoller's ideas stem from the work of the phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty (1962) who suggests that the task of representation is creative in itself, a task that requires the writer to engage the readers and to write evocatively -a stance echoed by postmodernist ethnographic writer Stephen Tyler (1986), who wants all ethnography to be an evocative, meditative vehicle for reflection and understanding. For me, this approach can and should be extended into the data-gathering side of ethnography and should not just be withheld for the writing. This means that the anthropologist's self becomes one of the key resources in ethnography, nowhere more so than in the anthropology of dance where it is vital that the writer dances and so shares the experience of the dance, joins in with the dancers and embodies the dance for: '[i]t is by dancing that one can fully understand dance … [Dancing] requires an observing participant rather than anthropology's orthodox participant observer, ' as Daniel suggests (1995: 21, 22) in her study of the rumba in Cuba.